This is an interesting issue in view of Eliade's own political history. Fascism, as its historians have increasingly noted, was a paradoxical mix of tribal, romantic, and historical consciousness; in a word, a mix of cosmos and history. Fascism was not really reactionary; as Stanley G. Payne has pointed out, a large part of Hitler's National Socialism—and, I would add, of fascism generally, even that of the Iron Guard—had roots as much in the Enlightenment, and subsequent popular ideas of the "modern" and the "progressive," as in romantic reactions against the Enlightenment: the revolt against traditional culture in the name of a revolutionary secularism and racial or social ''science" (or a revolutionary "Christianity" in the Romanian case), the idea of progress, emphasis on the "people" and the nation, in accordance with the Rousseauian notion of the "general will." 54
But what is distinctive about fascist history is that it does not want to work through rational democratic "larval" progress, depending on the occasional reform that survives the tedious compromising course of politics as usual, and their incremental human implementation. It demands instead sudden and magical history, charged by the sovereign power of will. This history is more akin to the strange freedom Eliade saw in cosmic man than what the terror of history was likely to bring. It is a recovery of the radical enlightenment dream of a new Eden, which after 1789 not a few thought could be refounded by revolutionary violence. Never mind that the cosmic religion freedom espied by Eliade barely corresponds to the reality of primal societies, which by modern standards are in fact burdened with conformity, repetitions, and exceedingly slow rates of change. The apparent freedom of new beginnings suggested by primal myths of eternal renewal implied to this modern observer magical revolution, the Guardist idea
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of national resurrection. The point now is, though, that after 1945 Eliade looked at the primal magic all in the mode of the modern scholar / observer, not participant /
observer. Whether in repentance or victory, Eliade emerges as a thoroughly modern man, a historian of religion.
And at the same time he was a slave of history, which role he had lived to the full. As all from the World War II generation know, that mighty conflict taught the lesson well. As Stefan, in Eliade's major and in large part autobiographical novel The Forbidden Forest, put it: Today the master of all of us is the war. . . . It has confiscated the whole of contemporary history, the time in which we are fated to live. All Europe's behaving like a monstrous robot set in motion by the news being released every minute from hundreds of radio stations, from special editions of the newspapers, from conversation among friends. Even when we're alone we think about the war all the time. That is, we're slaves of History.
And he adds, in what undoubtedly are Eliade's own words:
Against the terror of History there are only two possibilities of defense: action or contemplation. 55
He had once, diffidently and out of character, tried the former. The postwar years gave opportunity for the latter.
No doubt in later years Eliade felt about his own Romanian past as did primal folk about mythic time. He was drawn back to it, yet he knew he could not live there, and that all was not well with it. Even then, however, there were nostalgias upon richer nostalgias. In the thirties he published Intoarcerea din Rai ( Return from Paradise, 1934), a novel of the "young generation," which dealt with the "loss of the beatitude, illusions, and optimism that had dominated the first twenty years of
'Greater Romania.'" He had, he said, lived his adolescence in an atmosphere of euphoria and faith that already lay behind him and his cohorts. "We had lost it before becoming aware of it. Ours had been, in fact, the first and only generation which could enjoy the 'paradise' established in 1919–1920''—a spiritual and not political paradise, he hastens to add, and one already gone. 56 "I knew that I had lost the paradise I had known in adolescence and early youth: disponibilité, the absolute freedom to think and create. That was why I had produced
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so much, so fast; I knew that the leisure history had allowed us was limited." 57
Then there is Eliade the Platonist, who knew that on some still deeper level the timeless world and the world running down in time coexist, the days of time being etemity's mirrors. This meant that the sacred, the illud tempus or mythic time at the beginnings, all the initiations of shamans and heroes' quests, all the hierophanies, must be as real now as ever. Insofar as that side of reality is no longer visible in its traditional forms, it must be in deep camouflage. The sacred things are in fact universals, like Jungian archetypes (though Eliade insists, not identical with them), protean and capable of taking many shapes in many cultures.
The "camouflage of the sacred" is a major theme of the reflective side of Eliade's work. Probably the two Eliadean themes that have most influenced the intellectual world outside religious studies are the notion of modern camouflages of the sacred and the interpretation of shamanism in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 58 with its vivid portrayals of the shaman's call, "initiatory psychopathology" and marvelous flight. A generation of critics, playwrights, and psychiatrists found in those constructs abundant tools for their craft. At the very end of The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade alludes to various "camouflages'' of the sacred in the modern: in the veiled mythologies recapitulated by the cinematic "dream factory," in the yearning for the Golden Age in Marxism, in the "nostalgia for Eden" of nudism and yearning for complete sexual freedom. 59
In Cosmos and History, Eliade compares eternal return time, the time of "cosmic religion," with the time of history. The latter term embraces all that is creative and destructive in time as we, beings conditioned by history and historicism, know it: the "terror of history." But historical creativity is actually limited by the paths the past has preset, and so the present is really determinate though it seems free. Primal man, on the other hand, recreated the world each year and so is truly free.
Christianity, with its promise of freedom but its rootedness in specific conditioning time and place is the supreme historical religion.
Those implications can be read in a way that harks back to the first significant book about Eliade, Thomas J. J. Altizer's Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred. 60 Altizer, famous as one of the "Death of God" theologians of the 1960s, argues that the ultimate fulfillment of
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Eliade's vision would be a coincidentia oppositorum in which the sacred and the profane become one in a world after the death of the God who is separate from the world and "other." Certainly Eliade seems often on the verge of saying this, as he speaks of even the primal deus otiosus as a first Nietzschean death of God, of paradise as being a mere object of nostalgia, and of the increasing camouflage of the sacred in the modern world. But one never finds in Eliade the celebration of the sacredsecular symbiosis extolled by Altizer; rather, there is a sense of wistfulness for lost days when the twain were well defined. In reference to Altizer, whom he knew fairly well in the days of his 1957–1969 journals, Eliade remarked in early 1963: "I am continuing my discussions with Tom Altizer. . . . I reply: All these famous authors that Tom admires so are Westerners. . . . My dialogue has other interlocutors than those of Freud or James Joyce: I'm trying to understand a Paleolithic hunter, a yogi or a shaman, a peasant from Indonesia, an African, etc., and to communicate with each one." 61